"In an endnote to [The Virginia Woolf Poems], Jackson [Mac Low] explained the "diastic" or "spelling-through" technique he had used in writing the poems. The process began with a striking phrase from Virginia Woolf's The Waves: "ridiculous in Picadilly." He reread the novel, looking for the first word that, like "ridiculous," began with an r; then read the next word following that had (like "ridiculous") i as its second letter; then the next whose third letter was d; and so on until he had "spelled through" the whole phrase. (There were other rules for line breaks, punctuation, and so on.) The resulting text would be made entirely out of Woolf's words but would have none of the usual English syntax."
- Charles O. Hartman, Virtual Muse: experiments in computer poetry